If, like me, you consider the late David Foster Wallace to be a kind of one-man intellectual jam band, a concocter of game-changing but often excessive and formless philosophical/mathematical/literary/cultural riffs, then "Both Flesh and Not" might be the book for you.

Wallace is the sort of writer who, like the Garcia Marquez of "One Hundred Years of Solitude," is best dipped into a few pages at a time, the way you can wander off in the middle of an endless Phish improv, get a burrito, and come back 20 minutes later no poorer for the experience.

"Both Flesh and Not" is a selection of Wallace's uncollected nonfiction prose. It includes two articles on tennis; some very dated think pieces from the Reagan/Bush era on "Terminator 2"; and the then-current literary landscape, a reappraisal of a forgotten novel called "Wittgenstein's Mistress"; an intro to "Best American Essays 2007"; some book reviews; and an essay on mathematics in fiction that I am not qualified to evaluate.

Of these, the best is the famous title essay, an appreciation of Roger Federer written for the New York Times Magazine that might be the finest thing Wallace ever wrote. Wallace was a competitive tennis player in his youth and intimately understood the difficulty of what Federer does. The piece is written with Extreme Slow-Mo, Hi-Def precision, Wallace's exuberantly cerebrotonic flow (just barely) disciplined by the Times house style:

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His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and eccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact...

You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try it in terms of what it is not.

Despite his up-to the minute vocabulary and his forbiddingly modern typography (four-page run-on sentences, footnotes within footnotes, parentheses within parentheses) Wallace was a more traditional and derivative writer than is often recognized. His style was squarely in the school of what we might call the Garrulous Comic, whose most famous exponent was the Laurence Sterne of "Tristram Shandy."

Even one of Wallace's favorite and most characteristic critical techniques, using mock-statistical bullet points, in which each successive bullet point witheringly comments on the previous one, is clearly borrowed from the Harpers Index, as in this review of a piece of log-rolling academic hack work called "The Best of the Prose Poem":

•Highest conceivable grade that anthology's Introduction would receive in an average university Lit./Composition class: B-

Wallace often reads like an unlikely combination of Dennis Miller and Jonathan Schell, and this ironic/sincere dynamic exemplifies the crucial questions at the very heart of his project: How can we express our real feelings in a language that, like a worn-out bank card, barely transmits because of abuse and overuse, and in a culture where every utterance has a derisive two-second reverb?

Like Wordsworth's, Wallace's style is a moral style, concerned above all with honesty. If in Wordsworth, honesty to his own feelings meant the poet rejected the rhetorician's lie and reclaimed ordinary speech, in Wallace, honesty meant an accurate depiction of the mind's incessant electrical hum, and its constant self-emendation — hence Wallace's copious use of footnotes and his legendary prolixity.

How can we even know that we know what those feelings are? Can irony be turned against itself into a tool, a ritual force to make those feeling real, existing simultaneously with the sincere in order to enable it, the way the actors in Julie Taymor's production of "The Lion King" wear masks that allow their real faces to be visible at the same time?

And if this weren't enough, how can we self-fashion and make sense of things in an age of sense-bombardment and information overload, what Wallace called, in his typically self-deconstructing "Best American Essays" intro, Total Noise?

That Wallace, who hanged himself in 2008, succumbed to Total Noise — for what is mental illness but being unable to endure the noise in your head? — makes us realize how high the stakes were for him and raises the possibility that writing existed for him as a form of self-soothing. It gives these often funny essays an infinitely sad edge.

Not all kids who play baseball are uniformed with fancy script across their chests, traveling to $1,000 instructional camps and drilled how to properly hit the cut-off man. Some kids just play to play.